Tubular Labs has published its latest report on the state of social media video, and the key trends that are driving video engagement across the major social apps.
Tubular Labs provides insights to help power content strategies, with a database that now includes over 11 billion videos, from 28 million content creators.
With this dataset, the company’s able to provide some indicative notes on key shifts, and there are some interesting points in its 36-page H2 update.
You can download the full report here, but in this post, we’ll look at some of the key notes.
First off, Tubular reports that there’s been a big increase in longer versions of short video clips, extending the boundaries of the short-form trend on both YouTube and TikTok.
On YouTube, shorter video uploads (under 30 seconds) increased by double digits in the first half of the year. But longer clips (over 30 seconds in length) are up 39%.
Maybe attention spans are shifting, or maybe creators are finding that they can establish more engaging narratives in longer form video, though the trend is still shorter in terms of overall video length.
On TikTok, the trend is moving towards even longer uploads, with clips between 1 and 2 minutes also seeing a big jump.
As you can see, super short video clips are still the most common upload on TikTok, but engagement with these clips is declining.
That could be an important trend to note in your content strategy, that users are now seemingly looking to engage with longer videos, not at regular long-form length, but an expanded variation of the short-form trend.
Tubular has also provided insight into rising TikTok content trends and niches.
“Beauty” and “Music” make sense, but I’ll bet you weren’t guessing that “Business and Finance” clips were seeing such a significant rise in the app.
The top current trends in this category, according to TikTok’s trend insights tool, are “Home ownership at a young age”, “Viral finance tips”, “Financial services for entrepreneurs” and “Latino business success”.
If you’re working in these sectors, it may be worth taking a deeper dive into the app.
Tubular has also provided an overview of key trends across the major social video apps.
Instagram engagement is rising, which coincides with Meta’s push to inject more AI recommended content into user feeds. Back in April, Meta reported that 50% of the content that users see on IG now comes via AI recommendations, not from the profiles that you follow.
If you had any queries about why Meta’s leaning so heavily into AI recommendations, this is why, while it’s interesting to also note that Facebook video uploads are up significantly this year.
Facebook posting overall has been in decline over the last few years, as users shift away from uploading their own updates, in favor of sharing with smaller groups in DMs. The rise of Reels may have provided new inspiration to get more people posting to FB once again, or maybe, more creators are looking to re-post their TikTok content to Facebook, with a view to TikTok being removed in the U.S.
There’s a heap more insight in Tubular’s full report, which examines various key trends in depth, exploring the factors and topics that are driving each.
If you’re looking to maximize your video content, it’s worth a look.
You can download Tubular Labs’ H2 report here.
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